Many studies have shown that during the first year of life infants start learning the prosodic, phonetic and phonotactic properties of their native language. In parallel, infants start associating sound sequences with semantic representations. However, the question of how these two processes interact remains largely unknown. The current study explores whether (and when) the relative phonotactic probability of a sound sequence in the native language has an impact on infants’ word learning. We exploit the fact that Labial-Coronal (LC) words are more frequent than Coronal-Labial (CL) words in French, and that French-learning infants prefer LC over CL sequences at 10 months of age, to explore the possibility that LC structures might be learned more easily and thus at an earlier age than CL structures. Eye movements of French-learning 14- and 16-month-olds were recorded while they watched animated cartoons in a word learning task. The experiment involved four trials testing LC sequences and four trials testing CL sequences. Our data reveal that 16-month-olds were able to learn the LC and CL words, while14-month-olds were only able to learn the LC words, which are the words with the more frequent phonotactic pattern. The present results provide evidence that infants’ knowledge of their native language phonotactic patterns influences their word learning: Words with a frequent phonotactic structure could be acquired at an earlier age than those with a lower probability. Developmental changes are discussed and integrated with previous findings.

Matching an infrared image of a face to its visible light counterpart is a difficult task, but one that deep neural networks are now coming to grips with.

One problem with infrared surveillance videos or infrared CCTV images is that it is hard to recognize the people in them. Faces look different in the infrared and matching these images to their normal appearance is a significant unsolved challenge.

The problem is that the link between the way people look in infrared and visible light is highly nonlinear. This is particularly tricky for footage taken in the mid- and far-infrared, which tends to use passive sensors that detect emitted light rather than the reflected variety.

The chances are your large corporate is pretty elderly; companies don’t generally get big enough to be deemed as “corporate” without a few years under their belt. With that in mind it’s probably a good bet that your institution existed long before the internet did, banking retail, government whatever it may be your company has had to adapt to digital at some point in the last 15 years or so.Disruption on that scale to large business is incredibly rare, so much so that the digital boom seemed mor

For over a century, the neuron doctrine — which states that the neuron is the structural and functional unit of the nervous system — has provided a conceptual foundation for neuroscience. This viewpoint reflects its origins in a time when the use of single-neuron anatomical and physiological techniques was prominent. However, newer multineuronal recording methods have revealed that ensembles of neurons, rather than individual cells, can form physiological units and generate emergent functional properties and states. As a new paradigm for neuroscience, neural network models have the potential to incorporate knowledge acquired with single-neuron approaches to help us understand how emergent functional states generate behaviour, cognition and mental disease.

Social network analysis provides a broad and complex perspective on animal sociality that is widely applicable to almost any species. Recent applications demonstrate the utility of network analysis for advancing our understanding of the dynamics, selection pressures, development, and evolution of complex social systems. However, most studies of animal social networks rely primarily on a descriptive approach. To propel the field of animal social networks beyond exploratory analyses and to facilitate the integration of quantitative methods that allow for the testing of ecologically and evolutionarily relevant hypotheses, we review methodological and conceptual advances in network science, which are underutilized in studies of animal sociality. First, we highlight how the use of statistical modeling and triadic motifs analysis can advance our understanding of the processes that structure networks. Second, we discuss how the consideration of temporal changes and spatial constraints can shed light on the dynamics of social networks. Third, we consider how the study of variation at multiple scales can potentially transform our understanding of the structure and function of animal networks. We direct readers to analytical tools that facilitate the adoption of these new concepts and methods. Our goal is to provide behavioral ecologists with a toolbox of current methods that can stimulate novel insights into the ecological influences and evolutionary pressures structuring networks and advance our understanding of the proximate and ultimate processes that drive animal sociality.

Studies on friendships in online social networks involving geographic distance have so far relied on the city location provided in users' profiles. Consequently, most of the research on friendships have provided accuracy at the city level, at best, to designate a user's location. This study analyzes a Twitter dataset because it provides the exact geographic distance between corresponding users. We start by introducing a strong definition of "friend" on Twitter (i.e., a definition of bidirectional friendship), requiring bidirectional communication. Next, we utilize geo-tagged mentions delivered by users to determine their locations, where "@username" is contained anywhere in the body of tweets. To provide analysis results, we first introduce a friend counting algorithm. From the fact that Twitter users are likely to post consecutive tweets in the static mode, we also introduce a two-stage distance estimation algorithm. As the first of our main contributions, we verify that the number of friends of a particular Twitter user follows a well-known power-law distribution (i.e., a Zipf's distribution or a Pareto distribution). Our study also provides the following newly-discovered friendship degree related to the issue of space: The number of friends according to distance follows a double power-law (i.e., a double Pareto law) distribution, indicating that the probability of befriending a particular Twitter user is significantly reduced beyond a certain geographic distance between users, termed the separation point. Our analysis provides concrete evidence that Twitter can be a useful platform for assigning a more accurate scalar value to the degree of friendship between two users.

Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook have been trying to harness artificial intelligence by training brain-inspired neural networks to better represent the real world. Digital Reasoning, a cognitive computing company based in Franklin, Tenn., recently announced that it has trained a neural network consisting of 160 billion parameters—more than 10 times larger than previous neural networks.

The Digital Reasoning neural network easily surpassed previous records held by Google’s 11.2-billion parameter system and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 15-billion parameter system. But it also showed improved accuracy over previous neural networks in tackling an “industry-standard dataset” consisting of 20,000 word analogies. Digital Reasoning’s model achieved an accuracy of almost 86 percent; significantly higher than Google’s previous record of just over 76 percent and Stanford University’s 75 percent.

“We are extremely proud of the results we have achieved, and the contribution we are making daily to the field of deep learning,” said Matthew Russell, chief technology officer for Digital Reasoning, in a press release.

WebAssembly, an effort to diversify language support on the Web and speed up applications, is drawing both applause and skepticism.

While an analyst at Ovum is mostly applauding the technology, the founder of JavaScript presentation engine maker Famous is skeptical. With WebAssembly, technologists from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and WebKit are defining a portable binary format to serve as a compilation target for the Web for increased flexibility with different languages. The work provides a way to compile source code for the programmatic parts of Web applications so that they can be processed more quickly by the browser.

Frequency-dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency-dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on interactions between individuals within the population. This should be reflected in fluctuations of the population size even in constant environments. Here, we propose a stochastic model that naturally combines these two evolutionary ingredients by assuming frequency-dependent competition between different types in an individual-based model. In contrast to previous game theoretic models, the carrying capacity of the population, and thus the population size, is determined by pairwise competition of individuals mediated by evolutionary games and demographic stochasticity. In the limit of infinite population size, the averaged stochastic dynamics is captured by deterministic competitive Lotka–Volterra equations. In small populations, demographic stochasticity may instead lead to the extinction of the entire population. Because the population size is driven by fitness in evolutionary games, a population of cooperators is less prone to go extinct than a population of defectors, whereas in the usual systems of fixed size the population would thrive regardless of its average payoff.

Prosocial behavior is fundamental to the sustainability of society, enabling people to work in groups, to create larger and more successful social structures, and to contribute to the common welfare. However, despite the importance of altruism, science has only a limited understanding of how prosocial behaviors and selfish behaviors are represented in the brain. Additionally, individual transition between self-benefiting behavior and altruistic behavior is not well understood.

Recently, a mysterious photo appeared on Reddit showing a monstrous mutant: an iridescent, multi-headed, slug-like creature covered with melting animal faces. Soon, the image’s true origins surfaced, in the form of a blog post by a Google research team. It turned out the otherworldly picture was, in fact, inhuman. It was the product of an artificial neural network—a computer brain—built to recognize images. And it looked like it was on drugs.

Many commenters on Reddit and Hacker News noticed immediately that the images produced by the neural network were strikingly similar to what one sees on psychedelic substances such as mushrooms or LSD. “The level of resemblance with a psychotropics trip is simply fascinating,” wrote Hacker News commenter joeyspn. User henryl agreed: “I'll be the first to say it... It looks like an acid/shroom trip.”

The brain region that helps people tell whether an object is near or far may also guide how emotionally close they feel to others and how they rank them socially, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in the journal Neuron. The findings promise to yield new insights into the social deficits that accompany psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression.

The study focused on evidence for the existence of a "social map" in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that remembers locations in physical space and the order in which events occur. While previous studies had suggested that the hippocampus records a 3-dimensional representation of our surroundings when a key set of nerve cells fires, how the hippocampus contributes to social behavior had not been previously described.

Omega is an invention platform for the Internet of Things. It comes WiFi-enabled and supports most of the popular languages such as Python and Node.JS. Omega makes hardware prototyping as easy as creating and installing software apps.

With the growing amount and accessibility of data, data visualisation is becoming increasingly important. Not only does visualised data represent large quantities of data coherently, it doesn’t distort what the data has to say and helps the user discern relationships in the data. According to the writers of A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo, “The goal of visualization is to aid our understanding of data by leveraging the human visual system’s highly-tuned ability to see patterns, spot trends, and identify outliers.” In general, there are two basic types of data visualisation: exploration, which helps find a story the data is telling you, and explanation, which tells a story to an audience. Both types of data visualisation must take into account the audience’s expectations. Within these two basic categories, there are many different ways data can be made visual. In this article we’ll go through the 15 most common types of data visualisation that fall under the 2D area, temporal, multidimensional, hierarchical and network categories.

Social and biological contagions are influenced by the spatial embeddedness of networks. Historically, many epidemics spread as a wave across part of the Earth’s surface; however, in modern contagions long-range edges—for example, due to airline transportation or communication media—allow clusters of a contagion to appear in distant locations. Here we study the spread of contagions on networks through a methodology grounded in topological data analysis and nonlinear dimension reduction. We construct ‘contagion maps’ that use multiple contagions on a network to map the nodes as a point cloud. By analysing the topology, geometry and dimensionality of manifold structure in such point clouds, we reveal insights to aid in the modelling, forecast and control of spreading processes. Our approach highlights contagion maps also as a viable tool for inferring low-dimensional structure in networks.

Donald trawls Google Fonts for ten minutes. There are a few candidates, but Don’s not so confident in his font evaluation skills. He lands on Open Sans. Good ol’ faithful. He sets the actionable headline text to 48pt using the light weight in white. It’s perfectly centred over the stock photo of anonymous hands fondling an electronic device. The semi-transparent overlay assures the marketing team that the headline will always be readable. Because who knows what the headline will be next month—or what stock photo will appear underneath.

We are sometimes asked what the added value of applied neuroscience is. In the bid or preparation for projects, we sometimes hear: “why can’t we just do an eye-tracking study” or “we are mainly interested in biometrics.” Granted, neuroscience may seem as more cumbersome and it is traditionally a quite intrusive measure. Not the least when using methods such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), in which people have to lie perfectly still inside a claustrophobic tube and an extremely noisy environment, doing very repetitive tasks. Even with electroencephalography (EEG) the traditional method is using odd looking bathing caps, not something you’d like to meet your neighbour with strolling down the street…

Training Deep Neural Networks is complicated by the fact that the distribution of each layer's inputs changes during training, as the parameters of the previous layers change. This slows down the training by requiring lower learning rates and careful parameter initialization, and makes it notoriously hard to train models with saturating nonlinearities. We refer to this phenomenon as internal covariate shift, and address the problem by normalizing layer inputs. Our method draws its strength from making normalization a part of the model architecture and performing the normalization for each training mini-batch. Batch Normalization allows us to use much higher learning rates and be less careful about initialization. It also acts as a regularizer, in some cases eliminating the need for Dropout. Applied to a state-of-the-art image classification model, Batch Normalization achieves the same accuracy with 14 times fewer training steps, and beats the original model by a significant margin. Using an ensemble of batch-normalized networks, we improve upon the best published result on ImageNet classification: reaching 4.9% top-5 validation error (and 4.8% test error), exceeding the accuracy of human raters.

Neuroscientists at Duke University have introduced a new paradigm for brain-machine interfaces that investigates the physiological properties and adaptability of brain circuits, and how the brains of two or more animals can work together to complete simple tasks.

These brain networks, or Brainets, are described in two articles to be published in the July 9, 2015, issue of Scientific Reports. In separate experiments reported in the journal, the brains of monkeys and the brains of rats are linked, allowing the animals to exchange sensory and motor information in real time to control movement or complete computations.

In one example, scientists linked the brains of rhesus macaque monkeys, who worked together to control the movements of the arm of a virtual avatar on a digital display in front of them. Each animal controlled two of three dimensions of movement for the same arm as they guided it together to touch a moving target.

You know your cellphone can distract you and that you shouldn’t be texting or surfing the Web while walking down a crowded street or driving a car. Augmented reality—in the form of Google Glass, Sony’s SmartEyeglass, or Microsoft HoloLens—may appear to solve that problem. These devices present contextual information transparently or in a way that obscures little, seemingly letting you navigate the world safely, in the same way head-up displays enable fighter pilots to maintain situational awareness.

If you like Raspberry Pi’s and like to get into Distributed Computing and Big Data processing what could be a better than creating your own Raspberry Pi Hadoop Cluster?

The tutorial does not assume that you have any previous knowledge of Hadoop. Hadoop is a framework for storage and processing of large amount of data. Or “Big Data” which is a pretty common buzzword those days. The performance of running Hadoop on a Rasperry PI is probably terrible but I hope to be able to make a small and fully functional little cluster to see how it works and perform.

In this tutorial we start with using one Raspberry PI at first and then adding two more after we have a working single node. We will also do some simple performance tests to compare the impact of adding more nodes to the cluster. Last we try to improve and optimize Hadoop for Raspberry Pi cluster.

This paper presents a step-by-step methodology for Twitter sentiment analysis with application to retail brands. Two approaches are tested to measure variations in the public opinion about particular products and brands. The first, a lexicon-based method, uses a dictionary of words with assigned to them semantic scores to calculate a final polarity of a tweet, and incorporates part of speech tagging. The second, machine learning approach, tackles the problem as a text classification task employing two supervised classifiers - Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines. We show that combining the lexicon and machine learning approaches by using a lexicon score as a one of the features in Naive Bayes and SVM classifications improves the accuracy of classification by 5%.

When someone tries to remember 1 aspect of an event, such as who they met yesterday, the representation of the entire event can be reactivated in the brain, including incidental information such as where they were and what they did.

When remembering something from our past, we often vividly re-experience the whole episode in which it occurred. New UCL research funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust has now revealed how this might happen in the brain.

The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that when someone tries to remember one aspect of an event, such as who they met yesterday, the representation of the entire event can be reactivated in the brain, including incidental information such as where they were and what they did.

Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture contains two key factors required to model the process of diffusion of innovations, namely, social influence (i.e., individuals become more similar when they interact) and homophily (i.e., individuals interact preferentially with similar others). The strength of these social influences are controlled by two parameters: F, the number of features that characterizes the cultures and q, the common number of states each feature can assume. Here we assume that the innovation is a new state of a cultural feature of a single individual -- the innovator -- and study how the innovation spreads through the networks among the individuals. For infinite regular lattices in one and two dimensions, we find that initially the innovation spreads linearly with the time t and diffusively in the long time limit, provided its introduction in the community is successful. For finite lattices, the growth curves for the number of adopters are typically concave functions of t. For random graphs with a finite number of nodes N, we argue that the classical S-shaped growth curves result from a trade-off between the average connectivity K of the graph and the per feature diversity q. A large q is needed to reduce the pace of the initial spreading of the innovation and thus delimit the early-adopters stage, whereas a large K is necessary to ensure the onset of the take-off stage at which the number of adopters grows superlinearly with t. In an infinite random graph we find that the number of adopters of a successful innovation scales with tγ with γ=1 for K>2 and 1/2<γ<1 for K=2. We suggest that the exponent γ may be a useful index to characterize the process of diffusion of successful innovations in diverse scenarios.

The most highly evolved brain region in mammals is the prefrontal cortex, which regulates our thoughts, actions, and emotions through extensive connections with other brain regions. Studies in humans have shown that multiple parts of the prefrontal cortex are activated during memory tasks, but patients with damage to some of these areas do not always have memory problems. As a result, researchers have disputed whether memory deficits are caused by damage to individual brain areas subserving specific cognitive functions or by an interruption in the flow of information among widely distributed areas in the prefrontal cortex.

A recently proposed hypothesis reconciles these views by suggesting that cortical areas form a highly ordered network containing hubs that play a critical role in information processing, such that damage to a hub results in severe cognitive impairment. However, most investigations of network structure have relied on either anatomical studies or functional neuroimaging of spontaneous activity at rest, ignoring brain activity related to specific cognitive tasks.

In a study published this week in PLOS Biology, Yasushi Miyashita of the University of Tokyo School of Medicine and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a novel simulated-lesion method in monkeys to show that virtual damage to a prefrontal cortex hub, which was the most highly interconnected with other brain areas activated during a memory task, was predicted to produce the most severe memory impairment. By contrast, virtual damage to a highly interconnected prefrontal cortex hub that was previously identified in anatomical tracer studies was not predicted to produce severe memory problems. According to the authors, these findings lay the foundation for precisely predicting the behavioral and cognitive impact of injuries or surgical interventions in the human brain.

A startup called MetaMind has developed a new, improved algorithm for processing language.

Talking to a machine over the phone or through a chat window can be an infuriating experience. However, several research groups, including some at large technology companies like Facebook and Google, are making steady progress toward improving computers’ language skills by building upon recent advances in machine learning.

The latest advance in this area comes from a startup called MetaMind, which has published details of an algorithm that is more accurate than other techniques at answering questions about several lines of text that tell a story. MetaMind is developing technology designed to be capable of a range of different artificial-intelligence tasks and hopes to sell it to other companies. The startup was founded by Richard Socher, a prominent machine-learning expert who earned a PhD at Stanford.

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